LAYMEN still labor under the erroneous conception that war is far more frightful in modern times, and that it kills more of the combatants than formerly. Quite the contrary is true. In ancient war, when hand-to-hand fighting was the order of the day, as, for instance, in the old Roman times, casualties were far and away greater than they are in modern warfare.

MORE punch than can be found in a box-glove is contained in a new electric glove invented by Cirilo Diaz of Cuba for use by police while handling rough characters or in quelling riots. Persons contacted by an officer wearing the glove receive a 1,500-volt shock, sufficient to remove all traces of fight. A half-pound battery worn on the belt supplies the power, all wiring being concealed beneath the coat.

Police officials in New York where the device was first demonstrated, were favorably impressed by its effectiveness.

INSTEAD of tiring herself out walking around the store and selecting what she wants from the shelves, the housewife who patronizes the newest type of grocery sits down comfortably while the store “walks around” her. Literally, of course, it doesn’t quite do that, but the entire stock of the store passes before her on an endless belt and she merely picks out what she wants, placing the items in a bin beneath a stationary counter, as shown in the illustration at right. When she has completed her purchases, she presses a button. The bin goes to a wrapping room.

I have two hypothises for this picture. Either The Nazis were almost successful in creating an army of cyborg stormtroopers to take over the world, or somewhere on the back of the picture it says “Property of Fritz Lang.” (In German, of course).

Hydraulic Leg designed to give amputees the knee action essential in climbing stairs efficiently was developed by the Germans. The picture with schematic drawing at left was found among enemy documents and studied closely by the U. S. Air Material Command. (Compare with drawings in “Limbs To Order,” MI, Nov. ’46.)

WHAT the metropolitan skyport of tomorrow may look like, as conceived by Nicholas DeSantis, New York commercial artist, is shown in the illustration below. His remarkable proposal, embodied in a model that he has completed after five years’ study of the project, calls for a 200-story building capped by an airplane field eight city blocks long and three blocks wide. A lower level of his “aerotrop-olis,” as he has named it, offers a port for lighter-than-air craft. Hangars for planes and airships occupy the top fifty floors.

This is GENIUS. I’m going to buy an old Gravitron and charge an arm and a leg for centrifugalization treatment.

Old Age Rejuvenator Centrifuge

PERHAPS Ponce de Leon kept too far south in his search for the Fountain of Youth. He might have headed to Coney Island and there made himself young riding on a carousel, or a roller coaster, if a medical theory recently advanced is trueâ€”that, since old age is our final yielding to the inevitable, resistless pull of gravity, it is necessary only to overcome gravity and you overcome all that brings you down to earth. In describing trips to other planets, writers of science fiction have pictured the space travelers first crushed under intolerable weight during a few moments of ascent from the earth; then overwhelmed by a feeling of lightness, when all weight disappears. Indeed, there has been fear that too little gravity might have injurious effects on our bodies, unaccustomed to such a weightless condition; and that it would be as necessary to supply artificial gravity in a space ship as it would be to supply artificial air. However, no one seems to doubt that on the moon, or on Mars, freedom from the weariness of earthly weight would be pleasant.

Rush-Hour Reading Glasses
Rush-hour crowds packed John Holding into the London subway too tightly to read his paper. In desperation, he bought a pair of right-angle-vision glasses, the type used for reading in bed by invalids who can’t sit up, and reversed the prisms so the glasses viewed straight upwards. Now he rides and reads in the densest crowds.

Something tells me this didn’t work quite as well as the inventor claimed.

GLOBE STORES LIGHT FROM ELECTRIC BULB
Storing light in a globe was a feat recently demonstrated by Ethan I. Dodds, America’s most prolific inventor, whose collection of more than 2,000 patents was exceeded only by those of the late Thomas A. Edison. The evacuated interior of Dodds’ magic globe, which is covered by twelve of his U. S. patents, is coated with a mixture of phosphorescent chemicals. When an electric bulb is held in an aperture and flashed on momentarily, the lamp glows with a soft, even light for two hours. The bottled light, Dodds says, is suitable for use in mines and in industrial buildings, where a night watchman making his rounds, could recharge each globe with a flick of his flashlight.